R Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with R. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Religious faith is by nature the most fundamental set of beliefs that one can have. It is how a believer views the world, and is how the believer judges himself as well as the other people, things, and events in that world. It colors everything about them. It is for this reason that people who adopt a faith out of convenience appear so phony, and why it is simply not possible for an individual to have a "religion d'jour.”
“Religious faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women
can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is instead, an
inner spiritual strength which enables them to face those
storms with hope and serenity.”
Source: Humor of a Country Lawyer
“Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.”
Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
“Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.”
“Religious faith may very well be considered a science, for it responds invariably to certain formulae. Perform the technique of faith according to the laws which have been proved workable in human experience and you will always get a result of power.”
“Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.”
Source: Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
“Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.”
“Religious faith to W. H. Bragg was the willingness to stake his all on the hypothesis that Christ was right, and test it by a lifetime's experiment in charity.”
“Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us.”
Source: William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life
“Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.”
“Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.”
“Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.”
“Religious fanaticism is not the only clear and present danger in our world. The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. These create the breeding grounds in which religious extremism flourishes, because people who have been betrayed by the world’s political and economic systems often seek refuge in the alternatives offered by religion.
It is often said that the most dangerous person in the world is the person with nothing to lose. The more people in our world who have nothing to lose, the greater the danger of extremism is likely to become. If we are committed to struggling against religious fanaticism, and if we really do stand in awe of human potential, then we need to cultivate a much more intelligent debate about the role religion plays in nurturing that human potential through its shaping of ideas and through the hope and meaning it gives to many millions of lives.”
Source: The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion
“Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.”
Source: Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
“Religious fanatics and Political fanatics, yet we want Nigeria to be developed.
A nation filled with blind people.
See developed nations dealing on facts and figures, discovering cures for diseases, building people with great minds through science, proposing theories, debating over them, testing them and proving them thus using such theories to invent and innovate technologies.
Here in Nigeria, we are deceiving ourselves, fasting and praying. Pointing fingers at people who won't make heaven yet they don't wanna die.
A place where asking questions is a crime and a sin. They act as if they are holier than the pope.
Greedy and blind people.”
“Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.”
“Religious fervor has been known to lead mankind down some pretty disastrous paths in the past.”
Source: The Infinity Crusade, Vol. 1
“Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families.”
Source: The Allure of Goodness and Love: Pope Francis in the United States Complete Texts
“Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.”
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs”
“Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry.”
“Religious freedom is a fundamental human right.”
“Religious freedom is foundational for our country, and we must lead on religious freedom as an example in America.”
“Religious freedom is often referred to as America's first freedom. Our country was founded by religious exiles and built on the belief that God has given all people certain inalienable rights. Government's role in society is to protect these rights and ensure that we are safe from religious persecution and discrimination.”
“Religious freedom is too sacred a right to be restricted or prohibited in any degree without convincing proof that a legitimate interest of the state is in grave danger.”
“Religious freedom opens a door for Americans that is closed to too many others around the world. But whether we walk through that door, and what we do with our lives after we do, is up to us.”
“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”
Source: My Movie Business
“Religious fundamentalism advocates homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, polygamy and many other primitive evils. Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist – a theoretical pest from the stone-age, who somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect. Such a creature with no modern mental faculty whatsoever, knows nothing beyond the words of a book, written hundreds or thousands of years ago, when ignorance was the default mode of thinking in the society. It does not only believe every single word of a book to be literally true, but puts all its efforts to convince others to believe the same. This way, it would be an understatement to say, such is a worthless creature. In reality, such a creature can cause a catastrophic contagion in a society, especially if that society is already going through socio-political turmoil.”
“Religious fundamentalism, even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext.”
“Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.”
“Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.”
“Religious fundamentalists make me scratch my nuts. Makes me wonder. Are my nuts religious, or are the religious nuts? Or what?”
“Religious guilt will never grow the kind of love you want in someone.”
“Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.”
Source: Report of the County Chairman
“Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.”
“Religious Hermeticism - the whole cult of prisca theologia - encouraged religious tolerance and inspired a new and liberal approach to religion in the sixteenth century. Religious Hermeticists like Dee thought that a religion of the world, one of love and unity, could be developed through the rediscovered prisca theologia, and they envisioned a healing of the breach in Christendom. Religious Hermeticism did away with dogmatic theology, stressed the mystical unity of all religions and the oneness of God, and emphasised pristine Christianity and man's innate knowledge of the Divinity; the writings of the prisci theologi were used to support these ideas.”
Source: John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus
“Religious humor is not really my area, so I probably wouldn't do anything about that, or politics or something.”
“Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.”
Source: Islam: A Short History
“Religious ideas generally are activated in people’s minds only situationally, and religious action, including the act of expressing religious beliefs or attitudes, mainly is bounded and situational.”
“Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.”
“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
Source: Complete Works Of George Eliot
“Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.”
“Religious ignorance is worse than someone who never went to school.”
“Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.”
“Religious insights and values are just as important today as they were 50 or 100 years ago.”
“Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.”
“Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust.
With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.”
Source: Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
“Religious Jews believe that all things come from God, as God owns everything. The Tanakh says, “The Lord makes some poor and others rich; he brings some down and lifts others up” (NLT, 1 Samuel 2:7). “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it” (NIV, Proverbs 10:22).”
Source: The Money Code: Become a Millionaire With the Ancient Jewish Code
“Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.”
“Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful… becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical… if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Source: God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right